Here You Are, As You Are: Loving My Neighbor

Practicing Christ’s Way in Ordinary Relationships

What does it really mean to love your neighbor?

In a world shaped by division, fatigue, and constant moral pressure, love can feel either overwhelming or abstract. We know the command. We struggle with the practice.

In Here You Are, As You Are: Loving My Neighbor, Geoffrey Schmitt (writing as Willingheart) invites readers into a grounded, humane exploration of love as it is actually lived—imperfectly, wisely, and faithfully—among real people in real situations.

This book is not a theory of love. It is a companion on the road.

Beginning with Jesus’ reversal of the familiar question—not “Who is my neighbor?” but “Am I being a neighbor?”—the journey moves through the everyday realities that shape our relationships: attention and distraction, labels and assumptions, limits and boundaries, cost and endurance, failure and beginning again.

Drawing on decades of parish ministry, prison ministry, marriage enrichment training, and personal experience of grief, conflict, and reconciliation, Schmitt addresses love where it is most tested:

• families strained by difference
• churches and institutions marked by disappointment
• emotionally marginalized people who are hard to engage
• strangers and those living on the edges
• relationships that falter and must begin again

With pastoral honesty and spiritual depth, he affirms that loving our neighbor does not require endless availability, naïve compassion, or self-erasure. Instead, it calls for presence without illusion, mercy with discernment, and faithfulness shaped by grace.

Each chapter includes Scripture, teaching, reflection, prayer, poetry, and practical spiritual exercises, making this book well-suited for individual reading, small groups, and ministry settings.

At its heart, Here You Are, As You Are: Loving My Neighbor is an invitation:

to remain human,

to love wisely,

and to let a lived love become a quiet, credible witness in a fractured world.